Obesity remains a serious health problem and it is no secret that many people want to lose weight. Behavioral economists typically argue that “nudges” help individuals with various decisionmaking flaws to live longer, healthier, and better lives. In an article in the new issue of Regulation, Michael L. Marlow discusses how nudging by government differs from nudging by markets, and explains why market nudging is the more promising avenue for helping citizens to lose weight.

Two long wars, chronic deficits, the financial crisis, the costly drug war, the growth of executive power under Presidents Bush and Obama, and the revelations about NSA abuses, have given rise to a growing libertarian movement in our country – with a greater focus on individual liberty and less government power. David Boaz’s newly released The Libertarian Mind is a comprehensive guide to the history, philosophy, and growth of the libertarian movement, with incisive analyses of today’s most pressing issues and policies.

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Tag: North Carolina

There’s an old legal proverb about how to win a court case: “If the law is on your side, pound the law. If the facts are on your side, pound the facts. If neither is on your side, pound the table.” In this factually-challenged attack on school choice, two lawyers at the UNC Center for Civil Rights do a great deal of table pounding.

Despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, the lawyers charge that school choice programs don’t work and that they increase racial segregation. For example, they claim:

…in states with [school choice] programs, student achievement at the private schools is no better, and often worse, than in the public schools. In fact, in Milwaukee and Cleveland, whose voucher programs are the country’s longest running, traditional public school students outperform voucher students on available proficiency measures.

Even read in the most charitable light, the lawyers misleadingly compare apples and orangutans. Participants in school choice programs are generally more disadvantaged than the general population, so it is absurd to compare their average performance against the general population, which includes all the students in wealthy “public” school districts (where low-income parents have been arrested for trying to enroll their kids). Government school advocates rightly object when someone compares average private school performance to average government school performance. The private schools outperform government schools on average, but because both parents and the private schools select each other, the comparison breaks down. The same is true here.

A meaningful comparison requires a randomized-controlled trial, which is the gold standard of social science research because the process of randomization allows researchers to compare like against like and to isolate the effect of the “treatment” (in this case, the offer of a school choice scholarship). Fortunately, there have been 12 such studies addressing this very question from highly-respected institutions like Harvard University and the Brookings Institution. Eleven found that school choice programs lead to positive student outcomes, including higher academic performance and higher rates of high school graduation and college matriculation. One study found no statistically significant difference and none found a negative impact.

In 1980, frustrated by the attention given to Paul Ehrlich’s Malthusian doomsaying, economist Julian Simon challenged Ehrlich to a wager. They agreed on a basket of five commodity metals that Simon predicted would fall in price over 10 years (indicating growing supply relative to demand, contrary to the Malthusian worldview) and Ehrlich predicted would rise. In 1990, all five metals had decreased relative to their 1980 prices and Ehrlich cut Simon a check.

A North Carolina teachers union and fellow defenders of the government’s near-monopoly over education filed a lawsuit against the state’s school voucher program for low-income students, joining half a dozen other lawsuits against educational choice programs around the country. Plaintiffs made the same, tired, factually-inaccurate arguments against letting low-income parents choose where to send their children to school that we’ve come to expect. For example:

“Vouchers are bad public policy,” said Mike Ward, former state school superintendent and one of the plaintiffs. “They tear away millions of dollars that are badly needed by the public schools.”

Apparently no one told Mr. Ward that 22 of 23 studies found that public schools improved their performance in response to the competition that school choice programs generate. The last study found no statistically significant impact. NC’s government-run school system is in dire need of competition. As Parents for Educational Freedom in North Carolina point out, the latest report card from the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction reveals that “nearly 70 percent of low income students in North Carolina failed to meet proficiency standards.”

The lawsuit argues that the voucher program violates Article IX, Section 6 of the North Carolina Constitution, which requires that “all moneys, stocks, bonds, and other property belonging to the State for purposes of public education…and not otherwise appropriated by the State… shall be faithfully appropriated and used exclusively for establishing and maintaining a uniform system of free public schools.”

As I wrote almost exactly a year ago, my friend Mark Sigmon filed a case on behalf of the ACLU seeking to prohibit a town in North Carolina from enforcing its sign ordinance against a man who painted “Screwed by the Town of Cary” on the side of his house. Well, yesterday, the federal district court granted the plaintiff David Bowden summary judgment and entered a permanent injunction against the town.

The court concluded that the sign ordinance was content-based under the First Amendment because it required more than a perfunctory inquiry into the content of signs in order to determine whether the ordinance would apply. For example, the ordinance required the town to determine whether something was a “work of art,” a “holiday message,” etc. The court then concluded that the town’s asserted interests in aesthetics and traffic safety were not compelling, and that even if they were, the ordinance was not narrowly tailored because it would allow, for example, a huge flashing holiday sign.

The opinion in the case makes clear that governments should not be in the business of looking at the substance of speech, except in the most superficial manner – for example, to determine if something is commercial speech or not. Because the law is not entirely clear in this area, if the Town of Cary appeals, the resulting opinion should be instructive. Hopefully the Fourth Circuit would affirm the district court and take another step to ensure that core speech is relatively unmolested. Especially political speech that you write on your own house.

He did it on the campaign trail in 2008, he did it in his first year in office, and how he’s done it again: speaking at the Forsyth Technical Community College in North Carolina yesterday, President Obama praised post-Sputnik federal education initiatives aimed at improving achievement in math and science. The trouble is, those investments—the National Defense Education Act—failed.

Having already demonstrated the decline in achievement that followed the passage of the NDEA two years ago, I won’t re-hash it here. I’m left to wonder though, what the next two years are going to be like. If the president is still recycling campaign speeches about programs that never worked in the first place, is this what we can expect for the next two years?